Imagination Connoisseur, Tommy Mårtensson, makes the case that the Jurassic Park franchise may be permanently broken – and judging by the reaction to previews of the latest installment (JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION), he may be right.
Could Jurassic Park go the way of the dinosaurs? That’s not as obvious as it sounds.
I think the current state of “Jurassic Park/World”-franchise is sad and in a way, it echoes what has happened to Star Trek.
The original Jurassic Park, while it most definitely is a movie with adventure, spectacle, action, and even horror is at its core quite a serious science fiction movie.
The movie takes its time, not only to set the stage and build tension but to establish the “world” of the movie and you have lengthy scenes of the characters simply interacting, not only establishing who they are as characters but discussing ideas. And at the heart of the movie the idea of “mankind interacting with nature” is explored and all the action and suspense in the second half builds on those discussions and ideas despite it featuring dinosaurs Spielberg manages to ground it in a believable reality.
None of the sequels seem as interested in exploring these ideas more than they’re interested in spectacle and having dinosaurs killing people – and the two “Jurassic World” movies are the worst offenders of this. They’re shallow, hollow movies devoid of all sense of reality.
There are no themes or ideas actually explored other than having throwaway, stupid lines of dialogue briefly suggesting an idea and then they cut to the action.
In the original movie, the action and suspense scenes served the story and characters.
In the new movies, the story and characters are just filler between the scenes with spectacle and the writing suffers immensely from it even the action sequences are too over the top and cartoony to make you believe them which just makes them boring, especially since they tend to go on and on.
To me, they’re no better than modern Star Trek and it’s also why I have no desire to see “Jurassic World: Dominion” other than as a form of morbid curiosity to see how badly they will fuck it up.
Editor’s Note: Here are the first five minutes of the movie which were released to “entice” people to watch the rest in the theater …
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